I have film cameras, and I own a dedicated slide scanner, however I really have no desire to submit photos scanned from film. In essence, I feel that although the required skill sets for film & digital photography do have a large intersection, there is also much that is unique to each.
This is a digital photography site, and I would like to see it stay that way.
Oh I remember "film", that is where you had the smart ass at your local camera shop screwing up the development and or losing your negatives and saying "oops, sorry about that" All the while he was making copies of the nudes someone had left earlier.
Technically, what defines the term "digital" photography is the post processing. These days, digital and analog SLR cameras work very much the same way, with almost identical features and options, and in most cases, even utilize the same lenses. To put things into perspective, if you were to take an image from a film camera, scan in by what ever means you choose, and edit the photo in any way, whether it be a crop, or some form of image manipulation via photoshop filters, etc, it would be disqualified for being a digital image. I don't see any problem with using a scanned image as long as it still meets the date restrictions, and the editing rules of DPC.
After doing a quick Google search for "Canon 1Ds vs film", I found this web page with a recent comparison (June, 2003). And realize that the digital shots were taken with a 28-70mm zoom lens (set to 50mm), while the film shots were taken with a 50mm prime lens (primes are considered to be sharper than zooms).
Here is another link that includes the 10D, which shows (IMHO) that the 10D is at least equal to film. Note that in this comparison, no sharpening has been applied.
After browsing the samples in these article, I find it hard to believe there are people that still think "film is better than digital"... I'll take digital any day!
After browsing the samples in these article, I find it hard to believe there are people that still think "film is better than digital"... I'll take digital any day!
I'm not a film junkie, but I still think you cannot compare the two. The tests compare digital images to scanned film. not digital prints to film prints. I did my own test...
I went out, and shot a landscape using both a digital and 35 mm camera. All cropped the same way, exposed the same way, same filters, etc... I processed and printed the 35mm frame, with dodging and burning... I took the digital file, did adjustments so that it gave me the tonal range I wanted, dodged and burned, and printed it out on my epson 820 with Ilford Gallerie Inkjet Paper.....
The difference is easy to see when you're holding the two. They don't look the same, there was less shadow detail in the digital print and everyone I asked spotted the silver print quite quickly. Don't know if I could have made it look different printing on another kind of paper/printer combo.
But that doesn't make film better. Because having a different kind of finished print is not what photography is about. Its only a small step in a long process. Not every person who wants to delve into photography wants to deal with the cost of film, or do their own processing and printing. And the results aren't immediate like digital is.
Digital's been great in allowing more people to explore the world of photography, and allowing the whole process to be more immediate and in some cases, more enjoyable, with results of high quality prints closely mimicking film prints.
